Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/79

Rh food consumed and assimilated." Man, by reason of his larger organs, eats and assimilates more food than woman does. Each of his organs, including the brain, is therefore capable of acting with proportionally greater energy. Hence, "men will always think more than women" (page 583).

Collaterally our author finds that the demands of maternity must cause a large subtraction from the smaller amount of mental energy which women would otherwise exert, and, as the result of her fundamental propositions, she draws the startling conclusion that "unless woman can devise some means for reducing the size of man, she must be content to revolve about him in the future as in the past" (page 581).

Before entering upon the question by means of her own original and scientific method, Miss Hardaker makes the following statements: "Students of physiology see that a final and conclusive law can not be drawn from differences in brain-weights and measurements, because of the present imperfection of data." But the superior power of the male brain, like the superior power of the male muscle, is shown conclusively by its product (page 578).

The figures which begin Miss Hardaker's argument are those which all speculations regarding the brain take into consideration. These figures are quite complete enough to indicate distinctly that the average male brain is always larger than the female. Miss Hardaker herself states that "all accepted authorities agree that the average male brain exceeds the average female brain in weight by about ten per cent" (page 578). Now, if the principle that bulk is power were admitted, the measurements obtained would be nearly, if not quite, conclusive of the natural superiority of the male: it would not have been reserved for Miss Hardaker to make the discovery. Miss Hardaker can not afford to dismiss brain-measurements as incomplete evidence, for these statistics become the keystone of her own logic when she endeavors to prove man's mental superiority because of his excess of brain.

The student, however, does not reason as Miss Hardaker reasons. He, as well as she, possesses the historic fact that the product of the masculine mind has always been greater than that of the feminine. He might, therefore, find that, as the male brain has been more productive, it is the better organ. Upon this point Miss Hardaker contends that not only can we reason to the general quality of organs from their respective products, but we can actually arrive at a knowledge of their structure by such processes of logic. "We do not examine a muscle," she says, "to ascertain its internal structure" (page 578). If this were true, the occupation of the anatomist would be gone: the valvular arrangement of the heart, the cellular formation of the lungs, would have been disclosed by an observation of the externally perceptible operations of these organs. The truth is, that we can never